Minded Systems

Cisco Services Project Update

March 13th, 2010Tyler Winfield

Over the past few weeks great strides have been made on the XML Services project for Cisco IP Phone systems. The plan to make the project available through the FreePBX GUI is continuing on. The module(s) install without issue and all currently implemented functionality works in a simple form.

One of the next major steps in the development will be the ability to upload new service scripts into the module rather than by manual upload. As mentioned in the previous post on this project, we are looking to have a user portal; hopefully integrated with FreePBX v3 that will allow users to change their passwords. Currently the system does support multi-phone login to a single user profile. A remote logout function to remove a phones attachment to a user profile through the portal is also being planned.

Here is an example service that was built by Minded for keeping an eye on email as well as weather conditions, both current and future. The email information used to check for messages and the location to look up weather for are both supplied by the profile that the phone is currently logged into.(we are aware of the crappy purple background, this is just the default background color for the ‘Services’ panels on the Communicator. Its honestly entirely Cisco’s fault! I swear.)

In setting up the module to be able to handle the various XML Services that could be used, we’ve also run into the idea of including support for directory XML objects as well. At this point in the project the directories can be handled as if they were an XML services although the option has been tabled to add more specific support for directories and advanced organization of them. Add a module for the directories support is also a possibility.